What's Coming Up For My FlashForge Creator Pro Project?

 My blog has gotten a lot more visitors (relatively speaking) since I posted my FFCP control board mod, and as a self respecting DIY enthusiast no project can ever be done, so I thought I'd make a post talking about my aspirations for the machine. There's such a large owner community of MakerBot Replicator machines that I'm sure there's a spot here for me to help modernize them to save waste and rejuvenate some honestly supremely capable printers. Anyway, here's my list of to-do items:

  • Test the pre-drilled MK10 heater block personally. It will work, but I'm not sure how hard it will be to remove the ceramic heater from the stock heat block without stripping the allen screw.
  • Convert to e3d V6 hotend. I bet there's better flow rates that can be achieved with a V6 hotend, and it also has an all-metal heat break, allowing printing of higher temp materials than the standard PTFE (teflon) Bowden tube setup. I'm not sure if I should leave it as a direct extruder or convert to Bowden extruder, but I think I'll look into keeping it direct for now. I get plenty of weight savings by switching to one hotend instead of two anyway.
  • Make a mount for the control board, Pi, and bed heater mosfet on the bottom of the printer.
  • Upload my ABS Cura profile. Once I get everything tuned, I'm sure with some small modifications everyone who runs it can get a good start on printing ABS without all the initial fuss like I had to deal with.
  • Air filter for ABS fumes and particulate matter. I have my printer in my bedroom and I'd like to not have to worry about air quality. Inspired by the Voron Nevermore carbon filter, I plan on making a small recirculating air filter for the inside of the chamber to keep the air cleaner and also circulate air within the enclosure. I assume this will heat the chamber more evenly for ABS.
  • Temperature / humidity / particulate sensor (BME680 iirc) install. I'd like to wire this sensor into the build chamber to accurately give me statistics about the inside of the enclosure. It's pretty cheap, and I plan on placing it in a wiring and mounting-friendly location so it should be trivial to connect it to the Pi and start collecting data in Klipper.
  • Stronger door magnet mod. My door always shakes at higher acceleration speeds, so I believe with a little more magnet I can maybe make the enclosure more rigid.
  • Better enclosure feet. The stock ones I have are TIRED and want to die. I just grabbed some blue TPU, so maybe I can make ABS / TPU dampening feet and get more acceleration with less resonance compensation (mouthful, huh?).
  • Print off a camera mount for my GoPro and mount it for print monitoring.
These are all my goals for the printer. I realize that this goes way outside the original scope of the FFCP. It wouldn't make the most sense to buy one in 2022 (though they do still sell them, and many can be found for around $299 on eBay and Facebook Marketplace). However if you already have a FFCP or similar clone and you just want to improve it, this might be a good option.

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